Whatever…

I guess I haven’t posted anything today. What’s left to say? I was looking forward to the FPQ, but then I saw I would have to listen to a news clip. Ughhh. Like I’m not glued to the news enough already? Too much and yet I can’t stop looking at it like I’m passing a car wreck except it’s the whole world in a wreck and I can’t just pass by because I’m living in it too.

Then I was gonna post for the Color Code Challenge, but I didn’t have anything. I had pics with colors, but no pics with groups of colors. Boo. That would have been a fun post, if it had materialized. 🌈

I thought about Sadje’s pic of the woman on a cliff with the broken god, but eh. Then there was a “glorious” sunrise or something too. Meh. Just not feeling the fiction. Or poetry. The challenge from last week was humor, but I’m too consumed with anxiety to be funny right now.

The weird thing is that I had a relatively good day, very productive. Things ended on a happy note too, and now I have a 4-day weekend. I had planned to go to Vegas with some friends, but obviously that’s not going to happen now. I’ll read, write, exercise, and maybe watch a few movies alone at home. Those are the kinds of things I enjoy, so I’m not upset about Vegas, but I dislike uncertainty. A lot. 🙁

Believe it or not, I watched Contagion last night. It’s a good movie! People wonder why I’d watch that now, but now is a great time to watch it imo. Absolutely stellar cast too. It’s weird to see Bryan Cranston before he played Walter White. (Never watched Malcolm.)

So anyway… I’ll be around. My Thursday Inspiration is coming right up tomorrow morning and I’m working on my April A-Z game posts here and there. It’s a good time to catch up on things.

Stay safe! 💖

~*~

Image originally found on Pixabay.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

The Monday Peeve 27

Smiles and positive posts are all well and good, but sometimes I need to vent a bit. How about you? That’s what The Monday Peeve is all about, a chance to blow off a little steam at the beginning of the week, so then we can go merrily on our way once again (hah). I’ll pick a topic that’s on my mind, but you can vent about whatever you please, here in comments or on your own blog. Grab the photo, use the #TMP tag, and link back to me (or not ~ I dgaf), and Bob’s yer uncle. I do reserve the right to delete any links that offend my delicate sensibilities. So far, none have, but it could happen! I have feelings!

*

What is up with the WordPress app? Not only do we still have that pesky post gap overnight and during other random times where hours of lovely, tasty bloggery gets nommed up by the langoliers or some other scary time monsters, but now we have new glitches. First, they changed the whole look of the “splash page” and put buttons at the top. Grrrr changes. Bad! But more than that, the buttons require more stabbiness than the links below, and I don’t remember this until I’ve attempted to stab them a few times. Annoying. 🙄

Also, my notifications are screwed up at least once a day. The dot is on telling me I have new likes or comments, but then I can’t see them. Not only that, but I can’t switch between menus of likes, comments, and follows. To see these things, I have to go to a browser. Ughhh! The point of using an app is to avoid going to a browser! 😡

Stop screwing up my WP app, Happiness Engineers! 😛

~*~

Image originally from Pixabay.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Wow What A Week

I touch my face a billion times per day. Yes, I counted, which is why I haven’t been around much this week. I have itchy eyes and am aways messing with my hair and rubbing my achy neck and just generally transferring germs to my face and from my face to everywhere else. But now that’s a crime and also it’s scary to think that all this time people weren’t washing their hands or cleaning their houses. Gross! 🦠

Just when I think I’ve adjusted to the latest barrage of news about THE THING, here comes a new assault of information. Well, not information so much as stuff we’re not supposed to do anymore. First, it was hey quit hooking up with random men from the internet and I was all no problem been on that diet for over three years now. 👍🏻

Wash hands 87 times per day, got it. Clean everything all the time. Sure, okay. Unlike some of you lunatics, I already had Lysol and wipes and alcohol. Don’t go to China or Italy. Lol, okay. Don’t fly at all. Wait, what? Grrrr, okay… I canceled my trip to Vegas this week. Don’t sit in bars and restaurants. Sigh… I canceled Friday night plans and changed Saturday’s.

Tonight I read that Mayor Garcetti has shut all entertainment in Los Angeles ~ bars, gyms, libraries, museums, etc. Grocery stores are allowed to remain open and you can get restaurant takeout only. Governor Newsom says if you’re over 65 you should self-isolate. Luckily, I’m “only” 58, yet I plan to stay inside most of the time, basically go to work, then come home to work more and read/write/blog, and not do much else.

Oh, that’s actually my normal life! 🤣

Joking, sort of. Even though I’m not the most social of butterflies 🦋 I do make some plans… and I don’t enjoy being told I’m not allowed to. But I get it, I get it. I intend to comply with these guidelines in order to help myself and others too. It’s important.

Happily, we’re not really that isolated now, are we? There are so many ways we can stay connected without sitting next to each other in the same room. I’m looking at the bright side of this situation and saying, okay, how can I optimize my time? Well… read and write more obviously. I have lots of partially finished works in progress that I’d love to get on my Kindle shelf for you guys to buy, hehe. In a previous post, I mentioned that I plan to work on Ghosted this year again. Great opportunity!

And I definitely want to stay connected to Blogville! 💕 I know some of us have been drifting a bit or slowing down some, but I have every intention of soldiering on. My Monday Peeve and Thursday Inspiration posts will continue. I’ll do Jim’s Song Lyric Sundays as long as he hosts them. It’s rare I miss a (new) Wednesday Fandango FPQ, and I enjoy the Friday Flashbacks he began as well. I enjoy the weekly SOCS. Other prompts will happen as the mood moves me…

That brings us to the April A-Z Challenge. Last year, I said I wouldn’t do it again for a variety of reasons, but I’ve changed my mind. What’s funny is that I went to the website and was immediately annoyed just like last year! Oh, here’s one reason why I said I wouldn’t do it again… their ridiculous forms, etc. Well, ya know what? I’m going to do it without linking to them at all or jumping through hoops to get myself listed. I don’t care about trying to get more views here. If new peeps come by, great! But if the only readers I have are my “regulars,” I’m fine with that too. 😻

My theme is gonna be games. But I’m not gonna jabber on boringly about rules and game pieces and game theory and the history of chess or any crap like that you could go google for yourself. No. I’m gonna talk about how a game affected me. This blog is about ME! Me me me me!

~*~

Images credited to Bitmoji.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Tangled Thoughts #PoiMe

One of the things that motivated me to both begin this #PoiMe idea and also quit doing so many prompts was the Flashback Friday. Please bear with me through the tangle of thoughts here…

So, when I look for my FF post I generally find a book or movie review, a Wordless Wednesday, or someone else’s poetry (I was big on quoting back in the day). Why is this the case when my blog is so old? Well, I’ll tell you! It’s because I periodically hosed a ton of posts. Usually I did this because I was once again attempting to find the love of my life on a dating site. I didn’t want new men to visit and read all my bitching about men on dating sites, so I kept erasing my footsteps. Unfortunately, some of those posts were very funny and would have made good FF’s. Too bad. 😔

But the point is, my blog had become a bit sterile and structured. Old boring posts. Huge gaps in posting due to hosing. New posts mainly in response to other people’s prompts. Where was my very own stuff? There didn’t seem to be that much of it, and that bugged me. Yes, a poem or a piece of flash fiction is still “mine” even if I wrote it in reply to a prompt ~ and I’m pleased with some of those results. But to me, my blog should still have a sizable amount of my own jabbering straight from my own mind.

There hasn’t been much in my life that I can call mine without someone else telling me what to do, how to do it, and when. I realize that’s the case for most people, so I’m nobody special. But I do have writing. It’s the one thing. And for a while I was hoping to hand that over to someone else too, in exchange for major coin… in fact, I wanted this so badly I would have done anything… I do mean anything to achieve it. (Almost anything.)

But it didn’t happen. I changed the way I wrote in hopes of pleasing people who might pay me for it, but that didn’t help. I wrote totally different things, but nope. Nothing. Some near-bites and a couple bucks, but… nothing. Finally, I gave up and self-published. The beautiful thing about this path is that there’s no one telling me what to write and how many words, where to break chapters, that my characters are too much this or too little that, et cetera. I do what I want! 😈

Why then should my blog be kneecapped by prompts? It was entirely my own fault that I pressured myself to feel I needed to reply to so many. Whenever I felt like “just writing,” I thought mm can’t cuz I have all those prompts saved to do. Even at this very moment, I can’t escape the teensy dart of guilt for not writing about Fandango’s spaceship and instead blabbering on here.

But dangit I am determined to pointlessly meander now, at random times, when the mood strikes… 🦋

~*~

Image originally from Pixabay.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Pointless Meandering

Welcome to my new featured series: Pointless Meandering! Posts in this series will appear… whenever I feel like making them. I know, I know. That goes against all the marketing rules. You’re supposed to brand yourself with consistent posts on set subjects at scheduled times. Well, to that I say… pffft! 😛

I had a lot of trouble thinking of the name for my new feature. Names are important! First, I thought of meaningless babble or jabber. But after a while I didn’t really like “meaningless” because some of my posts could be meaningful, idk. I wouldn’t want to limit myself right from the start. The idea is just to be unstructured, but I didn’t want the word unstructured because it makes me think of bras. Does it make you think of bras? Well, it will now! 😂

Then I latched on to the word “pointless.” I like this word a lot… and it seemed perfect for my feature. Posts that have no point in particular. They aren’t peeves. They aren’t responses to prompts. They don’t tell a story. They aren’t funny or poetic. They just exist, floating in the Sea of Blogovia for no reason whatsoever.

But pointless what? Aye, there was a sticky wicket! Jabber and babble had lost their luster somehow. I gravitated to pointless musings. But I’m never sure how to pronounce muse… is it mewse or mooose? That’s a whole new digression… how I don’t say some words properly. I discarded this and considered pointless overthinking. I almost had it put away… had the logo done and everything. But then I thought, is it really overthinking if it’s cathartic and helps me? Maybe it’s the right amount of thinking… 🧐

Oh, speaking of the picture, which I found at Pixabay (a fab source)… I had my heart set on a butterfly, 🦋 but butterflies don’t engage in pointless behavior. All that flitting and nectar-nomming has a purpose. So, I contemplated a twisty path through the woods, but none of those pics appealed to me. (But that’s when meander began to take hold as the noun.) I thought of drifting, but when I looked up drift I got a bunch of racetrack photos. I tried float and when the jellyfish pics came up, they hit my sweet spot.

I could have used my own jellies, I guess, but I liked these. Anyway, I held onto the meandering idea even though I gave up the path in the woods photo. The jellies really seemed like the right choice. I added the text… first I used green, but I saw I had green on my peeve kitty and didn’t want to become branded as the green text blogger. I changed it to hot pink at that point and am pleased with the outcome.

This was fun. I’ll do it again sometime. 💖

~*~

Image originally found at Pixabay.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

New Feature!

Exciting news, blogpeeps! Now that the love/music February fest has ended, I’ve decided to incorporate a new feature into my blog. This will be an entirely new idea and requires zero participation from you, my readers, besides (of course) reading and commenting. 🤩

This is not going to be a prompt or a game. It’ll be just me babbling on about a topic that has snagged my attention for the mo. It’s not a peeve. It won’t have a point or a tidy conclusion. It’s just pointless rambling for cathartic purposes. I used to do this all the time in various venues before I got caught up in the madness of prompts, and frankly I miss it. My blog has become a bit too structured and predictable for my own taste.

Plus, I’m a bit tired of responding to other people’s stuff here, no offense. I feel that’s my entire life in a way… actually maybe this is a great post topic, so I’ll leave that thought as is for now. Please watch for my new feature, if you are so inclined.

When will my new feature appear? Do I have a bunch of them written and planned out? Well, no! 🙄🤣 All I have done so far is spend a ridiculous amount of time creating the picture for the feature, which may or may not become the topic of the first post.

~*~

Image credit to Bitmoji.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Supplemental Peeve! 😡

I already wrote today’s peeve last week and it went live at 4am today, but as I read the replies to Dr. Tanya’s post about posting, I am feeling the need to peeve again! And I can’t wait a whole week, I’m sorry. There are times, my friends, when our peeves must be let out of their cages at once, or else… or else… idk what. BAD THINGS. 😱

Dr. Tanya asks…

1. How long are your blog posts on average?

They are exactly as long as they need to be.

2. Given the option, would you rather post long form or short form content?

I would “rather” post as many words as I need to per post until I am done ranting about whatever thing, or a piece of flash fiction is finished, or a poem has reached the end.

3. Time is short and the attention spans of social media users shorter still, why do you think the search engines prefer longer content?

My guess is that short posts are the tool of spammers and other annoying folks who like to fling out links to news articles sans commentary just so other bloggers will visit their sites and they’ll get ad click revenue. I’m pleased to learn that search engines are trying to thwart this nonsense.

Also, time is no shorter than it ever was, fyi. An hour still has 60 minutes in it; a day contains 24 hours as it always has. Not only that, but we now have a zillion things to save us time… who churns their own butter or takes their clothes to the river to wash them anymore? Okay then.

Am I supposed to care what my readers prefer? Well, my active readers seem to like and comment on whatever silliness I write.

Thank you! ❤️✨🤩

As far as everyone else, pffft. Like it or lump it, as a famous philosopher once said.

~*~

Image credit to Bitmoji.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Looking Forward

I have been enjoying other bloggers’ recaps of the year past and usually I do something similar. This year however I’m skipping that type of detailed post. One reason is that I’m just too lazy to copypasta links to my top ten posts in a new post. Another is that I just don’t care which posts received the most views ~ and if I don’t care, why would you?

Lots of times a post I love (usually a poem) gets fewer views and comments than some picture of an old flower or whatever, so I find the stats pretty meaningless. I guess if I were monetizing the blog, I would obsess over such things, but I’m not and don’t. Also, it matters which day of the week and time of the day a post goes live, but I’m too busy to check that further. Plus, it’s boring.

The most important part of recapping the year in my opinion anyway is to thank everyone who has read my blog, whether regularly or sporadically, and interacted with my writing. So, would like to extend a hearty thank you to all my readers! ❤️ I appreciate all of you! 😍

Looking forward, my intent is to keep on blogging as usual but perhaps a bit lighter on quantity, since I’ve been refocusing on my unfinished writing projects. I began a new humorous story recently and it’s now taken priority over every other piece of fiction ~ I hope to have it available for sale on Kindle in the next few weeks. After that, I want to get serious about cleaning up my writing to-do list, like I said I would last year. 🙄

I spent a fair bit of time dealing with audio books last summer and was disappointed in the small amount of sales. I thought the talkers would do promo. I also assumed the site itself would market me. All wrong. Oh well. Since that was no fun at all, but writing is, I’ll stick with the written word.

I also need to read more books. With my move and other busy-ness, I’ve been in a reading lull. Writers need to read! Not just blogs and news, but real books. I can always feel my creativity and imagination begin to bubble and boil when I dive into the worlds that other writers have created. It’s a crucial component of the craft.

Dream big, my friends! 💖✨🥳

~*~

Image from Bitmoji.

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

BRA-less No More

So I had this incredibly stressful evening changing my address at the DMV online. Hopefully I didn’t screw it up because god forbid I won’t be able to vote for one of the doofuses in the early California primary. I waited until tonight because of my tags, which had already been sent, and I wanted to make sure they were actually in my hand before I began messing with stuff. The last thing I need is to stress about my tags being late, or not getting forwarded, or some horrible thing. But they are here, and all is good. (Another time we’ll discuss how I can’t bear it if I put them on the slightest bit crooked.)

But then I was sad because no one tagged me for a Blogger Recognition Award (BRA). Everyone else had a BRA, but I was going around BRA-less and starting to feel a bit self-conscious. I said this to Jim and he took pity on me, bestowing on me what we call in the business a “pity BRA.”

Some of you might think, “that’s no good… I’d be too proud to accept a pity BRA.” Well, that’s you then. Me, I’m taking it. Thanks Jim! I can always count on my good buddy Jim to help me out. I ran right back over here to display my BRA for all to see and get on with doing BRAly things.

I thanked Jim already yay! Now I have to bore you all to death with the story of how I began blogging…

In the beginning, all was darkness. Then I turned on a light, made a cup of tea, and thought what the heck am I going to do at 5 in the morning? Some of my writer friends had already begun blogs (2004), in order to promote their books and talk shop, so I decided to do that too. I mostly just blabbed on about whatever I felt like though, which was more fun than sticking to one topic. I was obsessed with stats back then, and this ultimately ruined my blogging experience. I highly recommend not allowing yourself to be consumed by counts of followers and views. In any case, my blog blurged along for several years, as I jabbered on about All The Things, until I got into a flamewar with some nutjobs about pitbulls. That’s when my comments got hacked and things went all kerflooey, to use a technical term.

I gave up blogging! Yep, I archived and deleted that blog and said pffft who needs this?

For about five minutes. Then I made a new blog where I only posted about cupcakes. And cats and shoes. That was boring. It hit the trash can after a little while. I had a few invite-only blogs at times too. Those were a bit more lively. 🌶

Finally, I began Light Motifs on Blogger. It worked out well except I like WordPress better for comments and such, so I made this one as version two. Originally, this particular blog began small-scale and I was mostly posting song lyrics 🎶 regarding a troubled relationship like some teenager. But gradually I branched out to full-on pointless rants and jabber as you see today.

Now, I’m supposed to give two pieces of advice to new bloggeroos. Everybody says the same things… write what you enjoy and don’t obsess about follower numbers yada yada (which I already said anyway), so I’m gonna say new things:

1. Don’t post about the same thing all the time because that’s boring. Unless you’re really really funny, then okay, but chances are you’re not, so don’t.

2. Don’t ask for money just because you exist in the WordPress community. I also exist, as do all the other bloggers here. And guess what? We all like money! Isn’t that an interesting coincidence? Why the hell should I buy someone else “a cup of coffee” because I like one of their posts? I drink coffee too… maybe they should buy me a cup. It’s so freaking ridiculous! Just. Don’t.

Note how my advice is negative rather than positive. That’s just how I am, spreading dark clouds of strife wherever I go.

~*~

Images from Bitmoji

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Spilling Ink

Dr Tanya is back with her interbloggatory!

How old is your current blog/website? 

-Rude! Next are ya gonna ask how much it weighs? 🤣 My first post on Light Motifs II was published on March 25, 2011. I had several other blogs before this one, the earliest dating back to 2004. Those have all been taken down due to… reasons…

Do you ever look back at your site i.e. read through your old posts?

-Sometimes, such as when I’m searching for a Friday Flashback post.

How long ago did you update your about page?

-Relatively recently to reflect my upgraded status to grandma.

If you were to start a new blog today, what would you do differently?

-Nothing, why… what’s wrong with this one?

~*~

Image credits to Pixabay and Bitmoji.

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.